quotes of the day

The current issue of Dissent has more than the usual share of high-quality articles. Lew Daly's "What Would Jefferson Do?" (pp. 59-66) nicely explains the folly of conservatives' claim that the limited government favored by Jefferson and the other Founders would be a laissez-faire plutocratic paradise like that promulgated by the Cato Institute and their cronies. While proving his case, Daly noted the following:

Indeed, as a proponent of public works and social investment, Jefferson openly celebrated the collective benefits of taxing the rich. In an 1811 letter to Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, he wrote," Our revenues once liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, &c., and the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rice alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings." Today such a view is called "class warfare." Jefferson called it democracy. (p. 65)

Another gem is this passage from Kevin (Liberalism for a New Century) Mattson, from his multiple-book review "Has Conservatism Cracked Up?" (pp. 108-111):

"What makes conservatism so unpalatable today is its [sic, the] inability of its adherents to accept responsibility for the results of their own ideas and the consequences of their political theories. The conservative mind dreads having the historical tables turned on it. Since 1968, conservatives have blamed liberals for a failed track record--arguing, for example, that the Great Society didn't tackle the problem of poverty and sometimes exacerbated it. Now with the track record of George W. Bush plain to see, conservative intellectuals fear liberals can return the favor." (p. 111)